hear him. As he spoke, his arm snapped up to block the second zombie as it reached for him, emaciated fingers clawing for his throat with jagged, yellow-brown fingernails. “We may have some company in tow,” Kane continued as he thrust the blade of his combat knife into the zombie’s exposed throat. The zombie simply shook its head, and when Kane removed the blade an off-white pus exuded from the rent in the dead man’s flesh. As Kane pulled his blade away, he heard Papa Hurbon chuckling from his supine position on the floor.
“We are surrounded by hostiles,” Kane continued into the Commtact feed. “Pick off anyone you don’t recognize.”
At that moment, the first zombie connected with a hard blow to the back of Kane’s head, and the ex-Mag staggered forward. Though Kane’s knees bent, he kept himself upright as he slammed against the other lurching zombie.
“I repeat,” Kane stated into the Commtact, “we are surrounded by hostiles. Dispatch on sight.”
With that, Kane drove a powerful fist into the face of the zombie standing before him. The undead creature didn’t move, but its face caved in like a rotten fruit, a cloud of skin dust flaking across Kane’s fist. The creature itself seemed to just wait in place, swaying a little as Kane watched it, the remnants of its face splayed across Kane’s knuckles.
The zombie behind Kane was moving closer, too, and the Cerberus warrior realized that he was hemmed in. Even as he backed away from his twin attackers, he saw that Ohio Blue was finally on her feet once more and had made her way over to the wall where the sword had been mounted. Blue pulled the sword from its twin clips and spun around to face the monstrous figures of the undead.
The beautiful blonde woman stepped forward, swishing the blade through the air and cutting at the zombie behind Kane. Although her blow struck, it was a pathetic effort, and Kane was reminded of his previous contretemps with the female trader out near Knoxville where she had proved to be far more of a con artist than a fighter.
With a foul stench reeking from its rotting flesh, the shambling form of the struck zombie turned to face Ohio Blue as she readied herself for a second strike.
“Ohio,” Kane instructed as he stepped across the small room to her side, “give me the sword.”
Blue didn’t need to be told twice. She handed Kane the two-foot-long sword as the shambling zombies took another step closer.
In return, Kane handed the blond-haired trader his knife. “I need you to free Brigid,” he instructed, stepping away from Ohio to face the zombies once again, sword held upright in a ready position.
The demands of her Outlander lifestyle had made Ohio Blue a very perceptive woman and, although she didn’t comment on it, she noticed that Kane had referred to his partner by her first name. That was unusual—very nearly unheard of, in fact—and though Blue didn’t know it, was a sign of his concern for the beautiful redhead trapped in the alien chair.
As Ohio trotted past the fallen body of Papa Hurbon, he reached out and snatched her ankle, pulling her down toward him. “Not so fast, pretty peach,” he said, that sickly sweet breath exuding from his mouth with each word he spoke. “There are other games we can play, man and woman.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, Ohio rammed the short blade of the combat knife into Hurbon’s crotch, and the man let out a pained shriek. “I’ll pass,” she told him as she scrambled away from the overweight priest.
A few steps away, Kane swung the length of tempered-steel blade at the approaching zombies, ignoring the howl coming from the floor behind him. The sword itself was the ritual weapon used to cut the curtain between the physical and the spiritual world in voodoo ceremony. Right now, however, Kane was using it in a less metaphorical manner, as he hacked at the looming figures, slicing chunks from their torsos as they silently strode ever onwards at him in the confines of the room. With a downward slice, Kane chopped off the reaching hand of the closest zombie, leaving the undead man with a stump that oozed putrid white pus. The hand itself slapped against the floor, a cloud of dust puffing up in its wake. Kane elbowed the wounded zombie aside and drove the length of the blade at the other figure’s torso, spreading the zombie’s ribs with the brutality of his attack.
Even as Kane dispatched the second zombie, three more had appeared in the open doorway to the inner sanctum, instinctively obeying the commands of Papa Hurbon as the man himself lay in a widening pool of his own blood. Kane steadied himself and swung the sword at the next wave of attackers.
Just six feet away from the scene of carnage, Ohio Blue ripped the last of the waving tendrils from Brigid’s form and pulled her from the savage embrace of the alien chair. A network of veinlike tendrils clung to the woman’s face and bare hands, and Blue hastily brushed these aside, feeling their spines snag at her own flesh like nettles.
“Are you okay, Ms. Baptiste?” Ohio asked as she swept the last of the tendrils from Brigid’s skin. As she did so, red welts formed and runnels of blood appeared on Brigid’s face in a cobweblike pattern.
Brigid’s breath came in an uneven, stuttered rush as she spoke. “What the—? Where was I?”
“Right here,” Blue assured her. “You were right here.”
Brigid rubbed a hand over her eyes, seeing the eerie alien visions still playing there for a moment. “I saw something,” she said, groping for the words to describe it, “like alien cartography.”
“We need to get out of here,” Blue told Brigid, and the words seemed to snap the former archivist out of her daze. “It was all a setup. Or something very much like it.”
Brigid saw Kane then, and she saw the horde of zombies shambling toward him through the open doorway of the sanctum. “Kane…” she began.
Without turning, Kane batted another zombie aside as it grasped for him from the open doorway. “We about done here, Baptiste?”
“I think so,” Brigid told him, still breathless.
Using the sword’s hilt as a club, Kane slammed another of the undead figures in the chest, forcing it to step backward as a cloud of foul-smelling dust burst from the point of impact. Knocked back, the zombie fell into one of its colleagues, and the two slow-moving figures struggled in the doorway for several seconds. As they did so, Kane turned and indicated the far door—the one through which he and the others had entered with Hurbon.
“Let’s get moving,” Kane instructed.
From his place on the floor, the one-legged priest shouted angrily, “You won’t get far. The chair has chosen her lover. You can’t escape it now.”
As Ohio and Brigid rushed out of the cramped inner room, Kane turned back to look at Hurbon, fixing him with his steely blue-gray glare. “I’ll bring your sword back when I’m done,” he told the corpulent man, whose hands still held his bleeding groin.
With false bravado, Hurbon laughed for a moment, until he saw the grim look on Kane’s face. “I’ll be ready,” he said, blood pooling beneath him.
“No, you won’t,” Kane told him as he stepped through the doorway and out of the inner sanctum of the voodoo temple.
OUTSIDE THE WOODEN STRUCTURE, crouched against the bole of a tree, Grant waited, the SSG-550 sniper rifle leveled in the direction of the building’s rotted doorway. Approximately two hundred feet from the doorway itself, Grant peered through the lens of the rifle’s scope. He had had no further
